Kick Start Your Content Marketing: 4 Free Tools

Good content not only attracts visitors it also builds trust, positions you as a thought leader in the market, builds your brand, generates leads, increases conversion rate and could bring in more sales. Marketers and Entrepreneurs who understand the power of content marketing create useful, value-adding content regularly for their customers. Research shows that such content marketing ‘leaders’ saw 7.8 times higher annual growth in unique site search traffic compared to ‘followers’!

But there is one great challenge with the content marketing: TIME.

Creating useful content takes a lot of time and effort, simply because there are many essential steps to creating good content – gathering content ideas based on your subject knowledge, crystallizing your ideas and presenting it in a relevant form, reinforcing it with visual content and finally sharing it with your audience and marketing it aggressively.

And there are no shortcuts to that!

But if you have right tools and develop a workflow/schedule to use these tools on a regular basis, then you can significantly reduce the time it takes to work on each step and improve your productivity. Ready to learn about these tools? Let’s jump right in.

4 Essential Free Tools to Help You Kick Start Your Content Marketing

1.Capture Ideas:

Capturing ideas is the very first step in content creation. Content marketing ideas are not like the ideas of a scientist or an artist that just pop out of nowhere and give you a ‘Eureka’ moment (sometimes that does happen) but most of the times, good content marketing ideas come out of a deep understanding of your target market, their needs, your industry, your own product or service offering and the pain points of your customers. Often, it is the ideas that are born out of such a foundation that go on to become evergreen content. But when such ideas come up, it is important to capture them, even when you are on the go. Here is a tool that can help you do that.

Evernote:

A freemium app tailor-made for note taking, organizing, and archiving. It also provides cross-platform support, helps to keep everything in sync between your computer, smartphone, tablet or any device you use. Check it our by visiting www.evernote.com

You can also use the application in mobile devices as it is available across different platforms

2. Create Content:

Once you have the idea in place, it is best to start structuring them into presentable content. The content could be in written form (blog posts) or in a visual form (video/image/infographic) or in an audio form (podcast). It is always best to use as many or all of the above formats. If you are comfortable with one of the formats, then start with it and then get help from others (or from agencies like us) or use tools to convert them into other formats. There are many tools in the market to help you create content. Here is a list of tools that are free, simple and easy to help you get started:

Written Content – Google Docs:

Google Docs is an online word processor that lets you create, format and collaborate with other people in real time

Step 1: Visit https://drive.google.com

Step 2: Sign-in using your google account (or sign up).

Step 3: Check out the features you need to use and you are good to start using the Docs (along with other amazing tools like sheets, slides, etc)

Even though there are many advanced video tools and techniques. The best way to get started in video marketing is using your smartphone. Yes, just mount it on a simple phone tripod (like this) and start recording. Here is a very useful guide from the guys at Wistia on how to shoot using your iPhone.

If you like the audio to be a bit more crisp, you can invest $20 to $30 and get yourself a beginner lavalier microphone (like this) that plugs into your smartphone. After that, all you need is a video editing app. (Yes, you can edit right on your phone!) Take a look at the list of apps that we have recommended in our earlier blog post. Now you are ready to create your video content using your phone.

Audio Content – Podcast

If you have a natural talent to help your customers using audio as medium, start a podcast. We recommend you read this useful article by Jay Baer on how to produce a podcast. It is not a very complicated process, but it surely needs a bit more effort and gadgets than the other two (written and video) types of content.

3. Share Content:

Now that your content is ready, it is time to share it with the world. This is the key step because however good and useful your content may be, if it does not meet the eyes (or ears) of the right audience, then it is as good as a content that was never created. The best practice is to start sharing with your first circle of friends, family, colleagues, customers and vendors. They already know you and they are already connected with you on your social media networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, so you can start sharing using the free tool below. Then as you progress you can find new and broader audience for your content by adding marketing and promotional activities like campaigns, ads, etc.

Buffer:

Buffer is a super-easy tool that helps you schedule, post and promote your content on multiple social media platforms with ease.

4. Interact with your audience:

Once you schedule and share your awesome content with your audience, soon you should start seeing engagement from your audience – they will ask you questions, share feedback, and enquire about your company. You should be ready and available to engage them without any delays. Responsiveness is important for social media marketing success.

Hootsuite:

One of the tools that can help you track conversation, respond to & connect with your audience is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a tool that is easy to learn. They have a free plan. The tool has been around since 2008 and has evolved much in the last few years.

Considering the long-term benefits, time spent in content marketing can be a good investment for your business. Go ahead and use these tools to kickstart your content marketing campaigns. Let us know (in the comments section below) if you face any challenges as you go along. You can also share your own experience with content marketing and how it has helped you in business.